The Vanished Man

joined Sellitto in the doorway. “Been talking to the neighbors,” one of them said. Nodding toward the body then doing a double take. She guessed he hadn’t seen the carnage up close yet. “Vic was a nice, quiet guy. Everybody liked him. Gay but not into rough trade or anything. Hadn’t been seeing anybody for a while.”
    Sachs nodded then said into her mike, “Doesn’t sound like he knew the killer, Rhyme.”
    “We didn’t think that was likely now, did we?” the criminalist said. “The Conjurer’s got a different agenda—whatever the hell it is.”
    “What line of work?” she asked the officers.
    “Makeup artist and stylist for one of the theaters on Broadway. We found his case in the alley. You know, hair spray, makeup, brushes.”
    Sachs wondered if Calvert had ever been hired by commercial photographers and, if so, if he’d worked on her when she’d been with the Chantelle modeling agency on Madison Avenue. Unlike many photographers and the ad agency account people, makeup artists treated models as if they were human beings. An account exec might offer, “All right, let’s get her painted and see what she looks like,” and the makeup artist would mutter, “Excuse me, I didn’t know she was a picket fence.”
    An Asian-American detective from the Ninth Precinct, which covered this part of town, walked up to the doorway, hanging up his cell phone. “How ’bout this one, huh?” he asked breezily.
    “How ’bout it,” Sellitto muttered. “Any idea how he got away? The vic called nine-one-one himself. Your respondings must’ve got to the scene in ten minutes.”
    “Six,” the detective said.
    A sergeant said, “We rolled up silent and covered all the doors and windows. When we got inside, the body was still warm. I’m talking ninety-eight point six. We did a door-to-door but no sign of the doer.”
    “Wits?”
    The sergeant nodded. “The only person in the hall when we got here was this old lady. She was the one let us in. When she gets back we’ll talk to her. Maybe she got a look at him.”
    “She left?” Sellitto asked.
    “Yeah.”
    Rhyme had heard. “You know who it was, don’t you?”
    “Goddamn,” the policewoman snapped.
    The detective said, “No, it’s okay. We left cards under everybody’s door. She’ll call us back.”
    “No, she won’t,” Sachs said, sighing. “That was the doer.”
    “Her?” the sergeant asked, his voice high. He laughed.
    “She wasn’t a her, ” Sachs explained. “She only looked like an old lady.”
    “Hey, Officer,” Sellitto said, “let’s not get too paranoid. The guy can’t do a sex-change operation or anything.”
    “Yes, he can. Remember what Kara told us. It was her, Lieutenant. Want to bet?”
    In her ear Rhyme’s voice said, “I’m not taking odds on that one, Sachs.”
    The sergeant said defensively, “She was, like, seventy years old or something. And carrying a big bag of groceries. A pineapple—”
    “Look,” she said and pointed to the kitchen counter, on which were two spiky leaves. Next to them was a little card on a rubber band, courtesy of Dole, offering tasty recipes for fresh pineapple.
    Hell. They’d had him—he was inches away from them.
    “And,” Rhyme continued, “he probably had the murder weapon in the grocery bag.”
    She repeated this to the increasingly sullen detective from the Nine.
    “You didn’t see her face, right?” she asked the sergeant.
    “Not really. Just glanced at her. It was like, you know, all made up. Covered with, what’s that stuff? My grandmother used to wear it?”
    “Rouge?” Sachs asked.
    “Yeah. And painted-on eyebrows. . . . Well, we’ll find her now. She . . . he can’t’ve got that far.”
    Rhyme said, “He’s changed clothes again, Sachs. Probably dumped them nearby.”
    She said to the Asian detective, “He’s wearing something else now. But the sergeant here can give you a description of the clothes. You should send a detail to check out the Dumpsters and the alleyways around here.”
    The detective frowned coolly and looked Sachs up and down. A cautionary glance from Sellitto reminded her that an important part of becoming sergeant was not acting like one until you actually were. He then authorized the search and the detective picked up his radio and called it in.
    Sachs suited up in the Tyvek overalls and walked the grid in the hall and the alleyway (where she found the strangest bit of evidence she’d ever come across: a toy